5 Common Migraine Triggers

Migraines and headaches afflict many people – if you or a loved one are one of those unlucky who regularly suffer from migraine headaches, you know how debilitating that crushing pain can be. You cannot sleep, you cannot work, you cannot get away from it.

Like most ailments, they don’t happen for no reason. What causes these headaches can vary as widely as the people who suffer from them. Migraine triggers vary from person to person.

Sometimes the solution is simple. For example, we know an executive who gets up at 4:30 AM every weekday for the commute to work. Every weekend when he slept in to catch up some much needed rest, he woke up with an excruciating cluster headache. The solution was simple:

Set his alarm for the usual time on the weekends

Get up for about 1/2 hour

Go back to bed

Headaches eliminated. Who knows why his body was rebelling against the weekend routine when other people can sleep in and feel great?

5 Common Migraine Triggers

If you learn what triggers your migraines, you can often avoid getting them in the first place. Once you have one, try to lessen the duration and severity with safe migraine relief.

In order to use the most beneficial natural remedy, it helps to identify what causes yours. Let’s look at five of the most common migraine triggers:

Stress and anxiety

Allergies and chemical sensitivity

Dehydration

Caffeine

Hormones

Can Stress And Anxiety Cause Migraines?

You bet! Stress and anxiety are among the top causes of migraines. Avoiding situations that cause you stress, or changing your lifestyle to one with less pressure may help eliminate or immensely reduce the number of migraines you experience.

Be aware of tension. Take a break, remove yourself from a tense situation, eat healthy and get plenty of rest – these proactive behaviors will help avoid migraines and tension headaches.

Headache From Allergies & Chemicals

Make sure you are eating fresh, unprocessed food and identify any allergy triggers or sensitivities such as chemicals in your food, cleaning supplies or clothing. Many people find their migraines disappear by eliminating wheat and gluten.

Headache From Dehydration

You might be surprised to know that one of the most common causes of headaches and migraines is dehydration!

Our bodies are over 70% water and most of us simply do not consume enough water throughout the day (not soda pop, not juice, not coffee – pure, safe, natural WATER). Despite our best intentions, the day can just get away.

Drinking enough water throughout the day to keep your cells hydrated is the simplest natural cure to prevent a headache from dehydration. Backaches too.

Caffeine Headache

Caffeine can trigger a migraine in some people and eliminate it in others, in what one website calls a caffeine paradox.

Caffeine is mildly addictive and as most regular coffee and cola drinkers know, if they don’t get a cup at the normal time, withdrawal can bring on a “caffeine headache.”

In such a case, even a small amount of the caffeinated beverage will cause the headache to subside.

Often included in medications and analgesics such as Exederin, caffeine helps other medicines relieve pain by boosting their effectiveness. However, consuming too much caffeine by combining these medications and drinking coffee, cola or the new energy drinks can also trigger a migraine.

Some chocolate producers even add caffeine, as if chocolate isn’t addicting enough on its own! (Clif Bar, anyone?)

We’ll let you decide whether avoiding the caffeine headache paradox is worth giving up your cup of joe and chocolate.

Hormonal Migraines

Changes in circulating levels of sex hormones (the estrogens and progesterone) influence “hormonal migraines” in some women. Most often, these migraine headaches predictably recur during or just before their period.

Levels of progesterone skyrocket during pregnancy, so if pregnancy brings partial or complete remission, then estrogen dominance is almost certainly a migraine trigger. About 20% of women whose progesterone is low do not have the same migraine relief during pregnancy, however.

Hormonal imbalance and the reasons for it are too complex to address in this article, but your headaches can be easily helped if you suffer from hormonal migraines, especially if low progesterone is a trigger.

It is essential that you seek out either a Naturopathic Physician or an M.D. who supports natural therapies, is proficient in hormone balancing and prescribes only bio-identical hormones. (We are not medical doctors and this is our opinion, not medical advice.)

From our research we strongly believe that the synthetic hormones used in contraceptives and most hormone replacement therapy are not pure, safe and natural for our bodies and might contribute to toxicity and imbalances.

Safe Relief For Migraine Headaches

We hope that identifying your particular migraine triggers helps you avoid getting them at all. For safe relief, read the next article if you want to be prepared with some natural remedies for migraine headaches, just in case: